Maryland romance author Laura Kaye is launching her new Hard Ink series this month with Hard As It Gets. Becca Merritt is desperate. Her brother Charlie is missing. Before he disappeared, Charlie sent her a message that said, “Find Rixey, the Colonel’s team, Hard Ink Tattoo.” With no other options, Becca goes to Hard Ink Tattoo and finds Nick Rixey, a former member of her father’s Special Forces team. Nick has no interest in helping the Merritt family. After Colonel Merritt betrayed Nick’s team, they were ambushed, and the survivors’ military careers were destroyed. Despite his feelings about Becca’s family, Nick decides to start checking up on her. He gets drawn into the intrigue when he saves her from an intruder who breaks into her house. Soon, Nick is working with Becca and reassembling his old team to help her find Charlie and save him from an organized crime ring.

Set in Baltimore, Hard As It Gets is a strong start to Kaye’s gritty new romantic suspense series, which will continue to follow the men of Hard Ink as they uncover the truth about the incident that destroyed their military careers. Filled with plenty of action and some steamy love scenes, this series and the hard-edged men of Hard Ink will appeal to readers who like Maya Banks’ KGI series or Julie Ann Walker’s Black Knights Inc. novels.

Earlier this year, Kaye’s unlikely path to writing romance novels was the subject of a fascinating Huffington Post article. After sustaining a traumatic brain injury from an everyday accident, Kaye developed Post Concussion Syndrome. She began experiencing behavioral changes, one of which was newfound creative ability. Though she had never written fiction before, she wrote a 450 page novel in only 11 weeks! Kaye’s unlikely injury was a twist of fate that led her to this unexpected new career.